


And You Don't Know a Thing 'Til You Get Inside

by rosa_himmelblau



Series: The Roadhouse Blues [3]
Category: Wiseguy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 23:50:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15278946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_himmelblau/pseuds/rosa_himmelblau
Summary: Maybe a stop in Maine will help.





	And You Don't Know a Thing 'Til You Get Inside

Of course Sonny had always known that Rafael Aiuppo was not the kind of guy you wanted to piss off. Fuck, he'd known that when he was a kid, before he was old enough to possibly do anything Aiuppo would even notice, let alone be pissed off by. Everybody knew about Don Aiuppo, and while he might not be God, he was as close as anybody Sonny knew was likely get, before the big dirt nap, that is.

That had been the reason Sonny had listened to him in the first place. Well, one of the reasons. The plan—Sonny's plan—had been to do what Aiuppo asked, at least to the extent of placating him, then just disappear. He wouldn't even go back to California, although Sonny didn't know where he **did** want to go.

Vinnie, of course, had changed that plan. How Sonny had not anticipated Vinnie would change his plans, Sonny didn't know—Vinnie **always** changed his plans, that was what Vinnie did. Things would be going along just fine, and then there would be Vinnie, fucking everything up. He should have just left him there.

Sonny wasn't sure what Aiuppo had been planning for him, but that was all right, he could have just disappeared and chances were good Aiuppo wouldn't have cared. He did, after all, have a larger problem on his plate.

Sonny glanced over at the larger problem, who was staring off into space. _I really don't need a two hundred pound doorstop,_ Sonny thought, and then corrected himself. _There's no way he weighs anywhere near two hundred pounds._ At this point he probably weighed in at about one-fifty, one-sixty, which was nowhere near enough. But that wasn't important, his weight was something Sonny could do something about. It was that vacant look—

No, it wasn't quite vacant. There was something in it, like a lone rat scurrying around in an empty house. His focused expression was something like mistrust, suspicion, wariness. He was waiting for something bad to happen to him.

 _Does he still think we're both dead? How do you convince someone they're not dead?_ Sonny didn't have a clue, but he figured he had a better shot at it than any psychiatrist, especially if they were just going to dope him up again.

The drive to Maine had been lively, at least. With the drugs washing out of his system, Vinnie was in that childish, belligerent mood, still raging at Aiuppo for reasons he didn't explain. And he managed to provoke Sonny into one screaming argument, but after that the anger that fuelled his energy seemed to run out, and without it, it was as though he had nothing at all.

Sonny started walking along the chilly beach. He'd headed northeast when they left the theatre because heading south would have taken them further into Jersey, which was a bad idea, or D. C., which might be worse, and he didn't want to travel too far until he'd gotten a good idea of how Vinnie handled life in the outside world. South was a bad idea, east was into the ocean, north would lead to Canada if they'd kept going—it seemed obvious that west the only solution, only west was away from an ocean Sonny hadn't seen in years, and he wasn't ready to let go again, not just yet.

He'd always loved the ocean, the way the horizon seemed endless when you looked out over it. That horizon, with its uncaring, empty beauty, had been his one escape when he was growing up. There was nothing cramped about it, nothing crowded, nothing that made him feel watched, confined, the way he did in the apartment he'd grown up in. He hadn't had a room of his own until Dave got married, and by then Sonny had gotten into the habit of getting away, to wherever he could find where he could see the ocean. That infinite horizon that was the only thing big enough to hold his dreams. That was why he'd gone to California, although he didn't like their ocean. It was backwards, and it was too warm. But a lukewarm, backwards ocean was better than none at all.

Vinnie was following him, and Sonny waited for him to catch up, then walked next to him. He wasn't wearing his jacket, which was stupid and inexplicable, but there seemed to be things inside Vinnie's head that made him do things Sonny found stupid and inexplicable. Sonny was damned glad he'd bought himself a coat. Maine was colder than he'd expected.

"You were right, you know," Vinnie said suddenly.

You'd think being told you were right would make a person feel good. Sonny enjoyed being right, but there was something about the way Vinnie said it that did not make him happy. "Right about what?"

"The bread trucks." Vinnie sounded downright dismal.

Sonny was baffled _The bread trucks? What bread trucks? And how can anyone sound so unhappy about bread trucks?_ Sonny decided not to ask.

"He wasn't—it's not like he had a choice." Vinnie sounded pretty defensive. Sonny wondered who he was talking about.

"Uh-huh," he agreed. This was what the shrinks did, right? The crazy person talked, and the shrink said, _Uh-huh,_ and _go on,_ and kept him talking, although what use there was in saying crazy things, Sonny didn't know. But whatever it was, it didn't seem too tough.

"He didn't have a choice," Vinnie said again. "That was why I needed to do the job I was doing, so a guy would have a choice."

"Uh-huh." _A choice about bread trucks? What the hell does that mean?_

"I don't care about numbers-runners!" Vinnie said suddenly, and with a passion that seemed all out of proportion for the subject.

Sonny understood the connection to the bread trucks, but not what Vinnie was so upset about, particularly something he claimed not to care about.

"What the fuck, if people want to play the numbers, that's their choice. But that's what it should be, a choice!"

 _Where in the world do people not have a choice about whether to play the numbers?_ Sonny wondered, trying to picture a neighborhood where people were forced to pick a number to bet on. He'd never heard of that one. "Uh-huh."

"He never hurt anyone," Vinnie said fervently. "He never hurt **anyone."**

"Of course not," Sonny agreed, with no idea who **he** was.

"It all just spun out of control. And who was he going to go to, the cops?"

"Well, I wouldn't," Sonny said under his breath.

"Like they'd understand. And that's another thing—that's what's wrong with the cops, that's why I wanted to **be** one, to not be like that! And if he had told the cops, we would've had to move away, try to find someplace safe to live. And where would we have gotten the money to do that?"

"It ain't easy to come by," Sonny agreed.

"He did what he had to do, that's all."

"Uh-huh." Sonny was beginning to revise his opinion of life as a psychiatrist. A whole day of this, talking without saying anything, would drive him crazy.

"But I thought you should know, you were right." Vinnie sounded like he was going to cry.

"Yeah. Great. Thanks."

Vinnie was quiet for a few minutes, then, "Do you know who it is who wanted me dead?"

Sonny had only gotten sketchy information from Aiuppo, but Vinnie wasn't asking for information, he was changing the subject. So Sonny kept quiet and let him talk.

"My own guys. My own people."

Now Sonny really looked at him. "What? I thought it was some Central American death squad."

"Yeah, yeah, they were the ones who grabbed me. But who sicced them on me in the first place?"

"Aiuppo said it had something to do with the son of a friend of your mother's."

"Yeah. Only I wasn't getting anywhere. Why go to the trouble if I wasn't getting anywhere?"

"Maybe you were but you didn't know it." That sounded like something out of the movies, but maybe it really happened.

Vinnie was shaking his head. "I never got any further than verifying what his mother had already told me."

Sonny didn't have any answer for that.

"It was Getzloff. I really think it was Getzloff."

"Getzloff?" Sonny wasn't getting this at all. Who was Getzloff? Did this have something to do with bread trucks?

"She always hated me," Vinnie went on, not answering. "From the time of Isle Pavot on, she hated me—"

"Wait a minute, **Senator** Getzloff?" Sonny knew about Isle Pavot, but he couldn't figure out what Vinnie had to do with it. But at least he was pretty sure this didn't have anything to do with the bread trucks.

"—she tried to impugn my testimony then, and she was part of the plan to destroy me later on."

The words sounded melodramatic, but Vinnie's tone of voice was matter-of-fact. He didn't sound paranoid, he sounded scared, and angry, and sad.

And hurt.

"Senator Getzloff?" Sonny repeated, wanting to make sure he was getting this right.

"Yeah, what, you suddenly don't think senators do stuff like that, or is it because she's a woman?" Vinnie sounded three seconds away from demanding to know whose side Sonny was on.

"No, I believe it, I just don't know what you're talking about. What'd you do to **her**?" Sonny wasn't really surprised to find out Vinnie had a lot of enemies, and important ones at that. That was Vinnie.

"Ruined her plans, hers and Masters's, Strichen's— How could I have been so fucking stupid?"

Sonny had asked himself that, a time or two about Vinnie, but the word he used had been naive, not stupid. There had been times when he'd wanted to shake Vinnie, tell him to wake up, this is how the world works. He couldn't exactly remember when those times were, but he remembered the feeling. So why did it bother him so much to hear Vinnie saying the things he'd wanted him to understand?

"I thought if you did what you're supposed to do—I thought you were supposed to do the right thing!" Bewildered and hurt and angry, all of which beat the hell out of dazed and confused. 

Sonny shrugged. "Aren't you?" He didn't know what Vinnie was talking about. He never thought about doing the right thing, or the wrong thing—you did what you needed to do.

"And if you're working for the good guys and you do the right thing, they don't—they aren't supposed to turn on you. They aren't supposed to try to destroy you for petty personal reasons!"

"No," Sonny agreed, "they aren't supposed to," not adding that if that's what they were doing, good was maybe not the right word to describe them. "So what happened?"

"I do the right thing, I stand up for Roger, and they go after me, they go after me **twice.** Frank saved me the first time, but—I'm glad he didn't save me this time, I'm glad because I don't want him on their list."

Roger would have been Roger Lococco, the CIA agent who'd been killed before he could finish testifying. Sonny remembered that, too. He was about to ask how Vinnie knew Lococco, but what difference did it make how Vinnie knew some dead CIA agent? And of course he knew who **Frank** was, Vinnie talked about McPike enough.

"You wouldn't believe the kind of grudges these people can hold. It wasn't about the money—I don't think they knew anything about the money. It was just that I embarrassed them, and I screwed up their plans."

Well, Sonny could relate to that, but still, having one of their own dragged off to be tortured—yeah, Vinnie was right about that. It wasn't what you expected from the good guys, even if they were only nominally good. That was, if you believed in the idea of good guys and bad guys, which Sonny didn't. Sonny knew that everybody was the same, just looking out for his own interests, and that included Vinnie, whose interests seemed to be fixing the world. But "good" or "bad," whichever side you were on, you were supposed to protect your own, something Vinnie's people didn't seem to know anything about. "What money?" Sonny asked. Money was something he understood, anyway.

"Roger was supposed to be getting Mel to pony up money for the invasion of Isle Pavot, and when Mel died, Roger stole a bunch, but it never got to the mercenaries. And then he was killed."

They kept walking, Sonny watching the horizon, waiting for Vinnie to start talking again, but he didn't, and then he turned and started walking back towards the hotel. Sonny watched him, thinking about following him but not really wanting to. Sonny walked on a little while longer.

 

When he got back to the room, Vinnie wasn't there. Sonny waited a few minutes, but he was hungry, and anyway he didn't really like the idea of Vinnie off someplace by himself. Sonny didn't think he would have gone very far on his own, and the only place to go in the hotel was the gift shop, so that's where Sonny went. He found Vinnie, which was good, but he found him looking at—or rather, sniffing at—the perfume, which was weird. The guy working the cash register seemed to think so too, from the way he was looking at Vinnie. And that just went to show what was wrong with the people in this stupid honeymoon hotel. They thought two guys shacking up together—they'd insisted on giving them this stupid room with just one bed—that was fine, but Vinnie smelling perfume was weird.

"I hope you're not planning on wearing any of that stuff," Sonny said. Vinnie didn't seems startled by his presence.

"None of it's right," Vinnie said, sounding distracted.

"Right for what?" Sonny asked, not sure he wanted to know.

"All the time I was locked up, I kept thinking about this one smell, but I can't remember what it is. I thought I'd see if I could find it, but—" He picked up another bottle, sprayed some on his wrist. "None of it's right."

At the words "locked up," Sonny's peripheral vision caught the cashier stepping back a little further from Vinnie. Sonny had the urge to say something to him, but instead he took hold of Vinnie's shirt sleeve, pulling him over with him. "Where's the nearest drugstore?" he asked the cashier.

The cashier had taken several more steps back at their approach, but he gave Sonny the name, address, and driving instructions as quickly as though he'd been anticipating being asked for this information, and Sonny dropped a twenty on the counter and took Vinnie out of the gift shop.

"You can't go anyplace like that, you smell like a whorehouse. We'll go back to the room, you can shower, then we'll go to this drugstore. And you'll wear your coat."

They were back in their room, and Vinnie was stripping off his clothes, dropping them in a disturbingly sweet-smelling pile. Just what the hell had he been doing, anyway?

"You're gonna have to put something else on, your clothes smell."

"My other jeans are in the laundry. But we passed a Goodwill on our way into town, we could stop and pick up something there."

"You are not going to Goodwill," Sonny said, and he didn't hit Vinnie. "And I'm for damn sure not going there. The last thing you need are more old, ugly clothes, and I don't want any. Your the laundry'll be back in the morn—" Sonny stopped when he saw that Vinnie was grinning at him. "Real funny."

He sat on the bed, switching channels on the TV while Vinnie showered. When Vinnie was dressed again, they left the hotel.

Sonny left Vinnie on Rexall's perfume aisle and went to get a copy of _USA Today._ He didn't know what this deal with the perfume was, but what the hell. Might as well humor him, make him happy. If he wanted to sniff perfume—well, it was better than some things he could be sniffing.

He wandered the drugstore's aisles, not really looking at anything, just thinking about Vinnie. Then Sonny went back to the perfume aisle, where he found Vinnie looking for a spot on his arm that didn't already have perfume on it. "Will you quit that?" Sonny took the bottle away from him. "Can't you just smell them in the bottle?"

"No, it smells different when it's on skin. You want me to spray it on you instead?" There it was, another flash of the old Vinnie, his Vinnie, the one who pushed back.

"That depends. You ever been punched out in a Rexall before?"

"You mean you'd hit me just because I made you smell like gardenias?" Vinnie reached for another bottle, and he was laughing. Sonny hadn't seen much of that, the playfulness, the fun. "I don't know what I'm looking for, but none of these are right." He put the bottle back down.

"OK, so what's this all about? Who's the broad whose smell you can't get outta your mind?"

"My mother," Vinnie said, so mildly Sonny didn't feel bad about the assumption he'd made. At least this made some sense, even if it was kind of sad. "It was when I was a kid."

"Your mother wear a lot of perfume?" Sonny asked.

Vinnie shook his head. "Pete and I gave her a bottle once, for her birthday. It didn't smell that great, but the bottle was gaudy."

"Then I think you're looking in the wrong place. C'm'on." He pulled on Vinnie's coat sleeve. "Come with me." Sonny took him over to where the hand lotions and things like that were. "Try some of these." If none of them were right, there was still the shampoo aisle. Sonny wondered if this place was open twenty-four hours. Everything women wore had some kind of perfume in it, so this could go on for a while.

But the first thing Vinnie picked up was what he'd been looking for, a dark blue jar. He was smiling even before he opened it. "This's it. I had one of these jars, they were glass back then. Pete had one, too."

Sonny didn't say that probably any kid who had wanted one of those jars had had one, that everybody's mother used Noxema. Hell, everybody's mother, grandmother, aunt, cousin, and sister used Noxema. You kissed a girl back then, you could practically count on smelling it on her, mixed with her shampoo and perfume, and the smell lipstick had back then. Sonny remembered watching his mother take off her make-up with it. He wouldn't have been surprised to find out even the nuns used it.

Vinnie was standing there, smelling it, looking like he'd expected it to somehow change his life. Sonny took the jar out of his hand and screwed the lid back on, then wiped the dab of white off the tip of Vinnie's nose. "C'm'on."

They were standing in line at the cash register when something occurred to Sonny. "You think there are lines in purgatory?" he asked Vinnie, who looked at him funny.

"Lines?"

"Lines," Sonny repeated. "We're standing in a line."

"I know what a line is!" Vinnie gave an exasperated laugh.

"Then don't say it like you never heard the word before." There were times Sonny had the feeling the holes in Vinnie's head went deeper than his memory.

"It's just a weird question."

Sonny did not say that Vinnie was in no position to be calling anybody else weird. Instead he repeated his question.

"Probably purgatory's nothing but one big, slow-moving line, ending with a cashier who doesn't have the change you need."

Sonny didn't say anything more. They got through the line, he paid for Vinnie's Noxema and his paper. Once they were outside, Sonny stopped him and buttoned his coat. Then he pulled the Noxema out of the bag, tossing the jar to Vinnie as they walked across the parking lot to the car. "You're not gonna start wearing that, are you?"

"No, Sonny. Not even if you ask me to," Vinnie said, pitching the jar back to him. He was laughing again.

"We got through the line. I got my change. You got your cold cream." Sonny threw the jar back, watched Vinnie catch it.

"Yeah?" Vinnie tossed the jar up in the air, caught it. "Is that what just happened? Thanks for telling me."

Sonny shoved him. "Idiot. We are not in purgatory."

Vinnie smiled at him, looking genuinely happy, and shoved Sonny back. "Yeah. You're right, we're not." As they were getting in the car, he asked, "Just how many whorehouses you been in, anyway, that you know what they smell like?"

Sonny started laughing. His Vinnie, and Sonny had him laughing and he didn't believe he was in purgatory anymore. No matter what Aiuppo thought, he'd done better than either the shrinks or the OCB could have, and all it had taken was a jar of Noxema.


End file.
